


Paradigm Shift

by intaglionyx



Category: Final Fantasy XIII
Genre: F/F, Gen, Gore, Hunting, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-11
Updated: 2013-07-11
Packaged: 2017-12-19 03:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/878710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intaglionyx/pseuds/intaglionyx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lightning decides to make a change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paradigm Shift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> For the prompt: 
> 
> "Lightning and Fang were always in my team, a picture of them both together looking hardcore would be most excellent! Alternatively, the pair of them sat drinking tea together would also be appreciated. If you're writing fic, then something with them working together, either in a fight situation, or just gathering enough food to eat to get the party through another night! Something where they get a chance to interact and show how they both contrast with and complement one another."

She feels like a fool, having looked at Fang and expected incompetence, sloppiness, a lack of skill only from her clothing and her origins. It was prejudice, she knows that now. Cocoon raised her to it, on stories of Pulse animals and Pulse monsters, and she listened like everyone else in that gargantuan cradle.

Nothing’s so bitter to her as being _wrong_.

Lightning focuses on the fight, pours herself into her blade and each casting of Ruin, cutting and blasting the behemoth with measured, sweeping grace. She watches Fang cut and twirl and drive bloody furrows into the beast, finally gutting the thing with an overhead thrust like a scorpion striking with its barbed tail. It hits the ground with an impact Lightning can feel in her legs and thighs. A tiny part of her wishes the fight had lasted for only a short while longer, so that she could have burned away the last tangling lengths of fear, wrapped tight around her heart like a fisher’s line, cutting the organ bloody and open. She hates feeling like this. It’s the worst kind of vulnerability there is and the greatest drawback of human relationships: not opening herself to harm, but the risk of harming others with but a word. She wonders if she had shown any of her initial contempt.

Fang shows her how to open the behemoth, cuts and rips and peels away its fur and flesh to expose blood and muscle. Lightning tries to think of it as meat and only makes herself sick. She tries to focus on Fang, on the gruesome sort of confidence she shows as she pulls a knife from her belt and sets to carving, on the blood that soon coats her fingers and hands and forearms—

Lightning’s never considered herself squeamish until now. Fang chatters as she works, her voice mellow and broad and perfectly normal as she does a butcher’s work. It isn’t the blood, exactly, that bothers Lightning. She’s a soldier, she’s killed more than her fair share of women and men and manmade monsters in the last few dozen hours, and blood hasn’t bothered her since her days as a green recruit. Now, though, she sees Fang finally cut free the behemoth’s lance-ravaged heart to hold it like a red, wet, steaming trophy over her head. The blood still pooled in the parts of it that are still intact is vivid as it streams down her skin. Lightning knows in the part of her mind that isn’t reeling from guilt, shame, and disgust that Fang is a very beautiful woman, but the image before her makes her throat tighten against hot, rising bile. 

She wonders how they’re going to get the meat back to camp, until Fang summons Bahamut and quickly sets to work carrying great stretches of meat onto the monster’s back. They both clamber on gracelessly, and after Fang secures it all, they take off. The sunlit Pulse air is warm against her face as, incongruously, the feeling of flight makes Lightning’s stomach calm. 

She thinks of Fang’s assured expertise, of the experience inherent in all of her movements of the hours since they met. The air rushing past her has, she thinks, scoured away all the shame of her initial judgments, leaving behind only a level of respect she’s only had for a few. Fang is as suited to this place as Lightning is not; their levels of expertise are even in combat, but for all that Lightning was at home on Cocoon, she is as out of place here as a behemoth would have been there. She needs Fang’s help perhaps more than she needs any of the others’ if she wants to survive long enough to do something about the chaos and manipulations that landed them all here, and she wants the woman’s respect and companionship besides. She resolves as surely as she once had to make herself into Lightning to cast aside Cocoon’s conditioning that had steered her so wrong before.


End file.
